In one incident, two sisters in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts pleaded not guilty on Jan. 29 after they permanently disfigured a 5-year-old girl in a ritual involving fire. One week later, Brockton, Massachusetts police arrested another woman for fatally stabbing her two sons in a different voodoo ceremony.

Voodoo’s roots go back thousands of years in West Africa, from a traditional religion known as vodun, and brought throughout the Caribbean and the United States by slaves. It flourished in Haiti where adherents incorporated many of the practices with Roman Catholicism, according to CNN.

At the heart of voodoo is the belief in spirits that inhabit human bodies and have the ability to influence lives. Practitioners utilize various rituals to contact these them. To most adherents, these spirits are benevolent and offer guidance and good fortune. Some practitioners, however, use the rituals to perform evil magic.

Many in the Haitian-American community are concerned about a backlash that could arise from the two recent criminal cases. The assaults on the young victims give credence to misinformation about voodoo, the practitioners fear. It feeds long-held distortions that voodoo is a mostly evil practice. These distortions began during slavery to repress the religious practice and convert Africans to Christianity.

Here in the United States, voodoo is associated with New Orleans. There was a brief resurgence of interest in voodoo in some African-American communities in the 1970s. But most adherents today are centered in the Haitian communities scattered across the nation.

13. Akwasi Frimpong, Ghana

14. Audra Segree, Jamaica

Continue reading Meet All The Black People Competing In The 2018 Winter Olympics

Meet All The Black People Competing In The 2018 Winter Olympics

This year's installment of the Winter Olympic Games is the most diverse its ever been, with an increasing number of Black athletes competing for gold medals in sports that are not traditionally associated with people of color.
Not including the 10 American Olympians, there are a handful of other Black competitors from countries that don't have a cold winter season, let alone see a single flake of snow, which makes their qualifications for the Games all the more impressive. By contrast, just 10 Black people competed in the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.
The opening ceremony is Friday, with the Games being held through February 25 in Pyeongchang County, South Korea.
Black women, who have been busy trying to save America from itself, make up the bulk of Team USA. Will they be able to win in South Korea, too?
Here's a closer look at all of the Black people competing in PyeongChang 2018.
[embed]http://https://www.instagram.com/p/BWI7iRkFKbA/?hl=en[/embed]